Adventures in content material advertising and marketing | Profitable Software program

Again in 2011 I created eventcountdown.com. It had a snazzy downloadable, PerfectTablePlan-branded countdown clock for Home windows and web-based countdown clock with adverts for PerfectTablePlan. Each free. The thought was individuals looking for countdown clocks for occasions (reminiscent of their wedding ceremony) would discover the positioning by way of Google, discover out about PerfectTablePlan and a sure share would then purchase my event seating planner software.

I paid different individuals to create the Home windows and internet variations of the countdown clock. The online-based clock was up to date infrequently so as to add pre-built countdowns for occasions like superbowl, the olympics, christmas, thanksgiving and so forth. And I fielded the occasional help emails associated to the Home windows countdown clock.

That is the overall visitors to the positioning from 2011 to 2023:

The peaks are principally attributable to superbowl. The location received 38k hits in a single day simply earlier than superbowl 2019! The free Home windows countdown clock additionally drew various visitors. In complete the positioning received some 1.7 million web page views over 12 years. Solely a small share of those guests clicked by way of to PerfectTablePlan.com, however nonetheless a helpful quantity. Maybe some individuals have been additionally prompted to analyze PerfectTablePlan by the branding on the downloadable clock. The location might need additionally had some search engine optimisation advantages for PerfectTablePlan.com. Who is aware of.

The eventcountdown.com web site is now gone (the area redirects to PerfectTablePlan.com). It didn’t appear well worth the effort to maintain including occasions to the online countdown clock with the visitors now so low. Additionally each the web site and home windows clock have been trying dated. However I believe it was a worthwhile funding of my money and time.

I’ve additionally created varied different contents pages and mini-sites over time: articles on desk planning, font collections, free clipart, place card templates and so forth. You’ll be able to see related trajectories for a few of these.

The visitors appears to achieve a peak after 3-7 years after which slowly decay away. Though I’ve proven them with the identical vertical scale right here, some generated much more visitors than others.

I did some primary on-page search engine optimisation for these content material pages. For instance, taking a look at Adwords key phrase knowledge to decide on the web page title and H1. However nothing past that. No paid promotion or backlink constructing campaigns.

I attempted paying individuals to write down articles associated to occasions. However none of those ever generated any worthwhile visitors. Google might in some way scent the insincerity.

For my data cleaning software product I’ve been concentrating on ‘learn how to’ pages and supporting movies aimed toward particular matters. These are meant to each assist present clients and to draw new visitors. For instance, how to clean data. I’ve additionally been posting these movies on the Easy Data Transform YouTube channel. The numbers of hits month-to-month on the Youtube movies are comparatively low, however they’re fairly focused and hopefully will likely be producing visitors for years to return.

So content material advertising and marketing take-aways primarily based on my expertise are:

• Free content material is usually a helpful option to carry free visitors to your web site.

• The quantity of visitors you get is sort of hit or miss. Some content material has generated much more visitors than anticipated, some quite a bit much less.

• The content material must be nicely focused if you wish to have any likelihood of changing it to gross sales.

• Google will develop bored of it will definitely. You may have the ability to improve the longevity by updating the content material. I’ve not been very diligent with this, however even uncared for content material pages can generate helpful visitors over 10+ yr lifespan.